Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Trolled.

Many of you wrote to tell me how you'd like me to deal with trolls in the future. Your language was often lively but clear. It was suggested that I follow the long-standing rule of the page: "Comments and posts that are designed purely to attack others and/or drive away readers are subject to deletion."

Perhaps we can also do a better job of not engaging with trolls when they do come around. Most sources I've read about this suggest trolls are seeking attention.

I've also gone back to yesterday and cleaned up some of the mess. Occasionally that means some non-offending comments end up zapped as part of a longer thread. I am sorry for the inconvenience.

4 comments:

I messed up yesterday by replying and getting into it. I have more left over anger about the things the troll did during my time on the blog. Yesterday just reminded me why I stopped. I don't envy you, Terry, but I appreciate you. You've handled things right this morning. Thank you for taking down my long comments because when I woke up this morning it was the first thing I wanted to do.

I do not understand anyone who gets a kick out of pissing in someone else's pool

Hi Fab. Thanks for saying that. Yes, there's no good to come from going after him. I know you reached out to him sincerely a couple of times early on, but he's shown time and again that he's just interested in name calling. We're the adjuncts at the community college. It makes him feel better. He's got to live with that. We don't.

Ben tells me he always zapped him right away. His history is such that I no longer feel any responsibility to treat him the way we treat anyone else who wants to talk about the issues of the blog.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.